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Sunday, November 18, 2012

Dear Bill O'Reilly...

...no calculator, moral or otherwise, will make it less expensive to arrest people than to help them. Trust me on this. The more you deny it, the more ridiculous you are:

Is traditional America gone for good? That’s the question Bill O’Reilly tackled during his Talking Points Memo on Monday night. Criticizing “secular progressives,” O’Reilly called for the right kind of politician who will help us confront the “reality of our situation.”

Traditional America can come back, O’Reilly said, with the right person to make it happen.
Specifically, he pointed to Mitt Romney‘s electoral loss among blacks, women and Latinos. “It was an entitlement election,” he said.

The media would have you believing the election confirmed election ideology. While that’s not true, he said, secularism is “eroding traditional power.”

“On paper, the stats look hopeless for traditional Americans,” O’Reilly said. “But they can be reversed. However, it will take a very special politician to do that. By the way, Mitt Romney didn’t even try to marginalize secularism. He basically ignored it.”

Secular progressives don’t have the right approach, he argued, because they don’t want judgment on personal behavior. For examples, O’Reilly pointed to the issues of out-of-wedlock births, abortion and entitlements. Secular progressives “don’t want limitations on so-called private behavior,” he said.

The majority of Americans can be persuaded, O’Reilly said, “that the far-left is dangerous outfit, bent of destroying traditional America and replacing it with a social free-fire zone that drives dependency and poverty.” We need to confront that, he added. But too many of our politicians are too cowardly to do so.

Refusing to place limitations on so-called private behavior...that's called freedom, right? Yeah, sounded familiar. Those damn secular progressives and their desire for freedom.

O'Reilly for some reason doesn't delve into the particular ways in which he'd like to limit private behavior, and how doing so would alleviate poverty and the need for "entitlements" and dependency. Probably because the only way he could suggest that his fans would actually get behind-- banning abortion-- would actually result in greater poverty and dependency. Not just because outlawing abortion would make criminals of women and their doctors, and criminals have to be identified, located, arrested, prosecuted, and punished, and that all costs money. But because childbirth costs money-- a lot of money, far more than an abortion-- and raising an unwanted child also costs money:

The women in the Turnaway Study were in comparable economic positions at the time they sought abortions. 45% were on public assistance and two-thirds had household incomes below the federal poverty level. One of the main reasons women cite for wanting to abort is money, and based on the outcomes for the turnaways, it seems they are right.

Most of the women who were denied an abortion, 86%, were living with their babies a year later. Only 11% had put them up for adoption. Also a year later, they were far more likely to be on public assistance — 76% of the turnaways were on the dole, as opposed to 44% of those who got abortions. 67% percent of the turnaways were below the poverty line (vs. 56% of the women who got abortions), and only 48% had a full time job (vs. 58% of the women who got abortions).

When a woman is denied the abortion she wants, she is statistically more likely to wind up unemployed, on public assistance, and below the poverty line. Another conclusion we could draw is that denying women abortions places more burden on the state because of these new mothers' increased reliance on public assistance programs.

An abortion is a last ditch effort to prevent what other thing Bill O'Reilly is not fond of? Unwanted pregnancies. Actually, he doesn't much care about pregnancies being unwanted; he cares about them being out of wedlock, because all babies born out of wedlock are going to be on welfare, and only unmarried women want abortions, because they're a bunch of young sluts. Right.

The "young slut" argument is why O'Reilly and friends also stand firmly opposed to the single biggest thing in the way of unwanted pregnancies that government can actually do something about, which is of course contraception. Providing education about contraception and making it easier for people to access it would save loads of money and prevent abortions, but O'Reilly doesn't like that because a) government spending money is wrong, at least if it's to provide education or financial assistance to people rather than to arrest and prosecute them, and b) doing so would amount to the government implying that it's okay to have sex without making a baby, and that's only a message a secular progressive would want to send to the young sluts. The message Bill O'Reilly would send is, of course: Don't have sex, until you get married. Then have sex, but without contraception, so you can have babies. But if you can't afford to have babies, don't come crying to me about abortions or welfare because you're not getting them.

Let's remember, nearly every American woman who is sexually active will use contraception at some point in her life. A typical American woman wants only two children. In order to accomplish this while having a normal sex life, she would have to be using contraception for roughly three decades. And 95% of Americans have had premarital sex.

So, Bill....tell me again how you'd propose to keep us out of poverty and independent by curtailing our personal freedoms? Oh, by being "traditional."

Gretchen Koch

A costly signal, in evolutionary terms, is a hard-to-fake sign of expenditure of resources for the purpose of demonstrating mate value-- the classic example is a male peacock's tail. In terms of human behavior it could be any display of exertion or expenditure performed for a variety of reasons, but especially to vividly display commitment to a group or an ideal. A blog, by contrast, is practically the definition of cheap signaling: a place where ideas can be freely and rashly expressed without necessarily indicating commitment to anything in particular, but the messages are conveyed nonetheless.

Gretchen's cheap signals on religion, cognition, science, feminism, sustainability, social justice issues, gaming, pop culture, moral psychology and a whole lot more can be found here. She has a PhD in the cognitive science of religion but should not be considered an expert on anything.